


We Need a Little Christmas

by jackaalope



Category: True Detective
Genre: M/M, another birthday gift for another amazing friend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 10:37:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3064673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jackaalope/pseuds/jackaalope
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He curled up with back pressed up against the wall at the head of the bare mattress. He listened to the window creaking, and the radiator humming, and the floorboards of the upstairs settling. And he wondered about community, and the idea of building sandcastles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Need a Little Christmas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hartcohle (karategirl448)](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=hartcohle+%28karategirl448%29).



> Allie, Allie, Allie, you lovely human being. <3 This is days and days late because I was in the midst of my own holidays woes, but I know you, and I know you understand because you are one the sweetest human beings on the planet. Literally talking to you gets me through the worst of days. You put everybody else first, and I hope you just understand how much that means to your friends. 
> 
> Also, fuck you, you're the one who dragged me into this whole mess, because yours was the first fic that I started reading for this fandom, and now I'm STUCK. Ugh. If only you weren't so fucking talented. (heeheehee it's been the bestest handful of months so thank you for just existing ^_^)
> 
> YOU MEAN SO MUCH TO ME AND YOU INSPIRE ME EVERY DAY AND YOU'RE SUCH A GOOD FRIEND AND UGH I JUST LOVE YOU SO MUCH<3333 I HOPE YOU LIKE THIS
> 
> Oh! And general disclaimer to the ~*~public~*~: this work contains gay slurs and general homophobia. Obviously I do not at all support that kind of thing at all. But that's all in the second little "chunk" of writing, so if you feel like skipping that part, then you can because it's not essential to the story. :)

Rust shot his first elk in the neck on the Christmas Eve that he was seven, and it bled red as anything all over the snow, melting it where it guzzled out of the wound. Years later he would suddenly remember its eyes as he came up to it and raised the gun again—when it froze, stock still, and just looked at him—because people did that too.

 

Marty had never believed in Santa Claus. He’d been pretending like he did for his mom’s sake for years now. But he didn’t. It was too much effort to try and make himself forget about noticing that the wrapping paper’d been left out, or that a barcode sticker was always still on the pack of Hot Wheels cars he got every Christmas—or, for that matter, that if Santa _were_ real, he must not have been feeling all that creative or generous when it came to Marty. Or at least not in comparison to the sorts of kids Marty knew from school. Marty didn’t even like Hot Wheels cars. In fact, he’d kinda wanted a Batman action figure this year until his dad had told him that action figures were just dolls and that they’d turn him into a faggot. And Marty didn’t know all that much about faggots, but he certainly knew that he didn’t like them, and he knew that he had nightmares about them sometimes, and he knew that they kidnapped boys and raped them turned them into faggots too. Like vampires.

 

Crash was about ninety-percent sure that Ginger was wearing a Santa hat.

“The fuck are you doing here?” Ginger’d asked as he’d slid into the booth next him, and grabbed Crash’s glass from his hand to down it. He’d had on a wolfish smile, one that curled up his lips by his canines just the littlest bit and didn’t extend to his eyes.

Crash took his glass back and refilled it, mechanically.

“Ask you the same fucking question,” he said, turning his face right into Ginger’s so their sweaty foreheads nearly touched. His words and eyelids drooped.

“Looking for you,” Ginger said. And he moved his face in closer like a snake, blue eyes unblinking and hard. “Need you to look at the shipment Jer got in.”

And Crash waited a long, slow moment before he broke their gaze and turned his attention back to the table. He lifted his glass and emptied it again.

“You feeling a little lonely on Christmas, Ginge?”

The table’s leg squealed as Ginger nearly started out of the booth.

“The _fuck_ you mean by that, motherfucker?”

“Jer don’t got any fucking shipment.”

And now Ginger was snarling, his bottom eyelids drawn up in reptilian disgust, but he still looked around, quick and careful, before he answered.

“No _shit_ ,” he hissed.

And Crash filled his glass again.

“Alright,” he said. “Just checking it out.”

“Well, don’t.”

“Yeah, well, chill the fuck out.”

“You chill the fuck out. _You_ chill the fuck out, motherfucker. You take your orders from _me._ ” Ginger’s eyes looked like they were about ready to pop out of his skull. And now Crash was about ninety-five-percent sure that, yeah, actually, he was wearing a Santa hat. “The fuck is with you tonight?”

“Fucking hate Christmas.”

 

Maggie’s hair hadn’t been washed in too long, and it stuck in little curls on the sides of her face by her ears. She was pissed. She was real pissed.

“Do you not realize how many hours I’ve worked this month, or do you just not give a shit?”

Marty’s tongue ran over one of his canines.

“Mags,” he said. “I don’t know what you want me to say. Okay? We’re both in the same boat here—”

“We’re _what?_ Are you really trying to tell me we’re in the same _boat?_ ”

“Look.” And Marty’s head was titled to one side now, his hands on either side of the back of one of the chairs. “You’ve been working… a lot. But I been working too, Mags, okay, I’ve been up to my eyes in… in files and—”

“Shut the fuck up.”

She was moving around the table towards him, her bottom teeth all bared like they got when she was pissed like this, her eyes boring holes in his.

“Maggie…”

“Who puts the girls in bed? Who puts them on the bus? Who feeds them dinner? Who feeds _you_ dinner? Who _cleans the fucking house_ , Marty—don’t try to tell me you’re overworked when I’ve been sitting here wrapping presents for over an hour at one in the morning, running on seven hours of sleep total in the past week.” She was hissing now, her voice caught between a whisper and a snarl. “You don’t do shit around the house, so don’t give me that. Don’t give me that.”

Marty was watching her toes now, her toenails painted a red like cough drops or lollipops or blood, his eyes scrunched up tight in an anger that was very nearly confusion. It faded off a little, quieted, as he thought about it.

“Alright,” he said, when he looked up. “Alright, you’ve got a point. Several points.”

A pair of thin eyebrows went up into Maggie’s forehead.

“Yeah?” she spat.

“Yeah,” Marty growled, slow, taking another step towards her. “Alright? I’ll try to pull some more weight. You happy?”

“Ecstatic,” said Maggie. And she turned on her heel, went back around the table, and resumed her wrapping in silence until he’d left the room.

 

There were waves—whole typhoons big enough to swallow cities—rolling up in his chest, rough as cat’s tongues, licking his heart raw and bloody. The radiator was turned up full-blast, its whining hum a metallic taste at the back of his throat. He was sat, naked, at the head of his mattress where it touched the wall with his thighs drawn up to his chest and his forehead pressed into his knees, and his eyes were shut so tight they felt like they might pop—and he wished they would, he really fucking did, because whenever he opened them he couldn’t stop seeing her.

So when the phone rang he was almost grateful.

When he summoned the force to get up to answer, the message machine had already just clicked on, and he still moved like the air was syrup. He sped up a little when he heard the voice was Maggie’s.

“Hi, Rust. I was just calling to see i—”

“Hello?” He sat down, slow, on one of the barstools, shutting his eyes again. He drooped by his elbows onto the counter, put his head down.

“I thought you must be home,” she said. And when he didn’t say anything, her voice, calm and cool and sharply comforting, went on. “You know, it’s Christmas tomorrow… and I asked Marty to ask you weeks ago, but of course he forgot: I was thinking that maybe you’d like to spend the day with us.”

Something cold settled in Rust’s throat.

He’d heard her wrong. That was all.

And it was a good ten seconds before he said, “Lost me for a second there. Think you could repeat whatever you… uh…”

“I was wondering if you’d like to spend tomorrow with us. At our house. You know. Have lunch, dinner. Nothing big. Just make a little day out of it.”

As she was talking, Rust had straightened up off the counter, hooked a palm around the back of his neck. His eyes were dark and his mouth was open, tongue running over his teeth as he thought.

She stopped. She was waiting for a response.

“I don’t do much by way of celebration.”

“Well, maybe you’d like to.”

Her voice was hard and determined. He was silent for a long moment.

“Maybe I would.”

“Be over at ten,” she said, immediately, and there was a smile curling in her voice. “And don’t bring presents. Alright? I mean it.”

Rust nodded before he remember she couldn’t see him.

“Yeah.”

“Alright.” And then a quieter moment later, “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” he said, even though there were stars coming out of a hole in the pattern of the countertop and there was enough loneliness and cough syrup and cold in him that his limbs all felt like somebody else’s. Maggie didn’t say anything for while.

“Goodnight, Rust,” she said, when she did.

“Night, Maggie.”

“See you at ten.”

And he hung up without another word, and everything was too silent again.

After a minute or two or thirty, he got up, clicked off the light, and settled down to bed even though there were still traces of sunset behind the window.  He curled up with back pressed up against the wall at the head of the bare mattress. He listened to the window creaking, and the radiator humming, and the floorboards of the upstairs settling. And he wondered about community, and the idea of building sandcastles.

He didn’t show up the next morning.

 

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was on TV and those little Claymation figurines had always creeped Marty the fuck out, but Maisie’d loved this one and so he’d felt too bad to flip to the next channel once he’d seen it on.

He blew on his soup—tomato, straight out of the Campbell’s can, just the way he liked it. Right temperature and everything. He’d always known better how to cook for himself than Maggie had.

The little figurines were singing, and the hairs on the backs of Marty’s neck were rising. He suddenly remembered that all the lights in the apartment were off except for the lamp on the table next to him.

Hardened criminals, drug runners, gangsters, murderers, he could take. Weird, tiny, singing creatures with jerky stop-motion movements? Probably not.

He changed the channel, then. But he leaned back a second later, folding his arms across his chest and unconsciously humming back that high-pitched song to himself:

“ _We’re on the island of misfit toys…”_

 

You got to a certain point in your life and you realized that your path was figured out in advance. Not like some of that predetermination bullshit. But you realized you’d always known it would come to this: you’d just made yourself forget it. You always had, you always had both known and made yourself forget it. And you’d forget it again. And again. And again.

It seemed like the already thin membrane between reality, _this_ reality, and what you might call the supernatural was even more transparent during the holidays. Maybe it was just that people thought about it more, about what was beyond them. And he’d get sucked into that too, sometimes. It was hard to avoid.

Rust was out offshore the night of Christmas Eve, 2007. There were three other men with him. One was deaf, and seventy-six years old, and had hands like a crab’s legs: just as jointed and thick and hard-skinned. He had a card from his daughter in his breast pocket, and a piece of construction paper that he’d shown them all. It had crayon markings all over it and, in a child’s crooked, laborious handwriting, “Merry Christmas, Grandpa”. Another man, a couple years younger than Rust, had teared up a little a day or two ago: he wouldn’t be spending Christmas with his wife and three kids, but he needed the money, he needed the money. He’d shown them a picture, though. And the third man—a kid, really; barely old enough to have dropped out of high school—had just put his head down and nodded and swallowed and said, “Yeah. Yeah. Same here.”

And Rust hadn’t said a fucking word. Not in three days. He didn’t trust himself to open his mouth or he might start howling and never stop, might start baying like a felled elk with an arrow in its chest. He walked around glaring instead, with his teeth under his lips, half-asleep behind overbright eyes. The others said things. He didn’t give a rat’s ass. They could go fuck themselves. Everybody could go fuck themselves. This was all there was. This was all there was for him. There was nothing besides the nets and the sky and the water. And the fish were scarce and light. The sky above poured down snow and snow and snow. And the water was starting to look warm.

 

Marty loved holidays. Had a real thing for holidays. And, you know, sometimes, in earlier years, Rust had thought that was nice, in a tragic kind of way: Marty’s uncanny ability to snap out of the real world as it was for a couple of days, slip a hideous sweater over one of his polos like wool over his eyes, and start getting real excited about things like putting little miniature pumpkins on his desk at work, or talking about taking his girls egg-hunting. Rust had thought that’d been nice in the same way that fussing over the color scheme of the napkins at a funeral reception was nice. Misguided, pointless, meaningless, but sweet. Undeniably sweet. Hopeful to the point of near nobility.

Right now, though, Rust mostly just wanted to kill him.

“Marty, this fucking tree is dying.”

There was egg on Marty’s hands, but he came backtracking out of the kitchen anyway, his forehead furrowed up. He glanced over at the tree, irritation growing in the crease between his eyebrows; glanced over at Rust.

“It ain’t dying. Look at that thing. Thriving away.”

Rust was about to say something about the inevitability of the death of something that’d been chopped directly in half and separated from the organs that allowed it to imbibe nutrients, but he thought the better of it. Construing his shrug as a conceit to his infallible logic, Marty nodded once and stepped back to his cooking.

He was making thumbprint cookies. The peanut butter kind with the Hershey kiss in the middle, and goddamn if Martin Eric Hart had ever thought he’d be standing in a kitchen making fucking thumbprint cookies, but there he was, and it didn’t feel quite as surreal as it should have. He’d called Maggie up for the recipe this morning.

There was Christmas music blasting from the stereo, telling them the story about Frosty the Snowman (the last time it’d come on, a few days ago in the car, Rust had laughed harder than Marty’d seen him laugh in weeks—he’d said something about how it was a metaphor for something or other, but Marty couldn’t remember that now, had only a laminated and now well-thumbed memory of the way the lines around his eyes had crinkled up when he’d laughed); and Rust was curled up in the armchair reading something or other; and there were little candle-shaped lightbulbs flickering in the windows even though it was only seven-thirty in the morning. Marty hadn’t been able to sleep. There had been—and still was—excitement fluttering in the span between his last two ribs and Rust had already been up, so he’d just yawned, stretched, and started baking thumbprint cookies.

“Hey, you like this song, yeah?” he called out to the living room once he’d gotten up the courage.

“This one?”

“Yeah.”

And Rust, in the other room, listened, tilting his head and rolling his eyes sideways like an old hound.

“This the one about snowman reincarnation?”

Marty snorted into a shell-filled bowl of egg.

“Jesus fuck,” he muttered and then, louder: “Guess you could call it that.”

Rust thought about it a minute.

“Yeah, I like this song.”

So Marty turned it louder with a slimy hand. In the other room, Rust closed his book, shaking his head.

“Neighbors are gonna shoot you,” he called, over a chorus of violently jingling sleigh bells.

“It’s Christmas Eve!” Marty shouted back. “Most wonderful time of the year!”

And Rust just shook his head again, unfolded himself from the armchair, and made his way into the kitchen. He rested a hand on Marty’s back.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said into his ear.

“Why you telling me? Want me in there with you?”

This hadn’t been Rust’s intention, but he shrugged with a little duck of his head.

“Wouldn’t say no.”

And a gentle warmth poured through the steady ache in Rust’s chest as Marty bit the side of his lip, grinning.

“Gimme two minutes to wash this egg off my hands,” he said, holding them up to show, and leaned forward to settle a peck on Rust’s unsuspecting lips. “Go get set.”

“Yeah,” Rust said, soft, and clapped Marty on his side and was gone.

He ghosted on into the bathroom and turned on the tap, slid off his sweatpants without shutting the door. There was lube in the medicine cabinet nowadays, and he popped open the mirror with his eyes settled down on the sink. He looked at it. He shut the mirror.

The shower was steaming and Rust was in it, water beating down on his back, by the time he heard heard the bathroom door click shut and Marty was pulling back the curtain to peek in, Christmas music still blaring away in the kitchen. He gave Rust a look up and down and nodded slow, feeling the sides of his jaw go prickly. He shut the curtain with a decisive motion, and then there were the sounds of clothes being hurriedly pulled off and dropped.

When Marty opened the curtain again, he didn’t stand and stare this time. He just climbed right in without shutting it and knocked Rust back against the tiles so hard that the water coming from the showerhead sputtered, his hands enclosing Rust’s wrists, pressing them up against the wall by his head. Their mouths knocked together in a rasp of early-morning stubble and the smell of cigarettes and the thrust of tongues.

And then Marty stepped back and looked at him, his hands still spread over Rust’s wrists: beating veins and wiry muscle, more than capable of throwing him off if he’d wanted to. There was a furious, predatory hunger in Marty’s eyes. But Rust just tilted his head back and looked at him down the bridge of his nose, lids shuttering his eyes but want betrayed by the breath running hard through his parted lips.

He looked at Marty that way for a silent, tenuous moment.

And then he said, “We gonna fuck to the sound of that shit?”

 _Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer_ was still blasting away on the other side of the wall.

“Oh. Guess I forgot to turn it off,” Marty said, with an innocuous little smile in his blue eyes.

Rust snorted.

“Ah, c’mon. Have a little Christmas spirit.”

There wasn’t even humor in Rust’s eyes. Just bald, bland irritation.

“No,” he said, and he dropped his head back down to gaze at Marty straight-on, tilting his head to one side like a vulture examining a particularly well-picked set of bones. But Marty just shook his head and laughed. He took a hand from Rust’s wrist and brought it down to swat at his hip.

“Bet I can make you,” he teased, and left his palm clinging where it’d landed. He smoothed it backward, settled it, warm, between the tile and the supple skin of Rust’s ass.

Rust’s eyes became crescent moons under the drop of his eyelids and his chin tilted to the ceiling as Marty closed the space between them, settling their hips together as he sang along to the blaring radio.

“ _Then one foggy Christmas Eve, Santa came to say…_ ”

And so Rust just bucked into him a little, broke the grip on his wrist to grab hard at the back of Marty’s thigh, and locked his teeth round his upper lip. That sure as fuck quieted him. Rust dragged his mouth downwards

“Tell me how you want it,” he growled against Marty’s throat, feeling him melt against him.

“Darlin’,” Marty laughed, a little hoarsely, and Rust felt the muscles in his neck leap as he swallowed, “you could do whatever you wanted to me.”

 

Marty returned calmly to his baking; Rust curled up into the couch with Marty’s Saints sweatshirt settled over his chest in white and gold, flipped on the TV, and, minutes later, was snoring away soundly when Marty poked his head back out of the kitchen to comment on something or other. Marty stood in the doorway and looked at him, his head tilted to one side and a faint smile on his lips. It’d been days since he’d been shifted temporarily awake by the sound of Rust falling asleep beside him. Rust’d been coming to bed in the early hours of the morning and getting up again long before the sun rose, and Marty suspected he only lay down at all just to ease Marty’s mind. It’d been worrying him, worrying him to the point where he’d shift in close and get all his limbs up around the other man when he slid under the covers beside him at night, try to warm him, try to comfort him somehow just by basis of contact. Marty couldn’t stand it. But then again Rust had always started looking a little threadbare around the end of December; it’d been going on for as long as they’d known one another.

So Marty stepped back into the kitchen and lowered the radio by gradual increments. He didn’t use the electric mixer (which he’d bought in a baking phase a couple of years ago), but his hands instead.

 

Rust woke a good eon later to the fading, gilded smell of fresh-baked cookies and the sound of Christmas music slipping back out of his head and into his ears again and the warmth of Marty’s palm resting lightly on his hip.

“Time is it?” he muttered, squinting back at him against the light of the lamp that had already been clicked on. Marty smoothed his hand over the quilt—shit, he’d even covered him up and Rust had just snored through it all—and consulted his phone on the side-table.

“Nearly six-thirty,” he said.

“Shit.” Rust sat up slowly, like an old dog who’s just noticed geese but can’t quite be bothered to chase them. “Shit, I slept the whole fucking day.”

And Marty clapped him on the thigh.

“Needed it,” he said, and Rust grunted and shook his head.

“What’d you do?”

A little shrug rocked up the side of Marty’s shoulders.

“Baked,” he said. “Made all them thumbprint cookies. And some chocolate chip ones. Oh. And I, uh, y’know, made us some Christmas Eve dinner, too. Nothing big. Just got a little rotisserie chicken from the store and popped it in the oven; threw some mashed potatoes together from the box; got us some eggnog—the virgin kind, y’know. But, uh, well, should be ready in a few.”

A gradual crease of a half-smile grew along Rust’s eyes.

“You gonna light some candles, too?”

And he’d been joking, but Marty looked across at him and shrugged.

“Might.”

 

He did, actually. Two stubby little tea lights he’d found in the back of the cabinet. Set them on a blue plastic plate in the center of the table. Plucked a couple of little branches off the Christmas tree and put them in a glass. Spread the checkered blue-and-white tablecloth for special occasions underneath it all.

And Rust laughed at him and shook his head, but he sat down when Marty pulled out his chair for him all the same: “This is some fuckin chick flick shit.”

Marty brought out the mashed potatoes in a green, fake-glass bowl that he believed with all his heart was fancy as hell. Then he set the chicken down in a puddle of yellowish grease on a white plate with a steak knife jabbed into its breast, and he sat down across from Rust.

“I know you don’t like this kinda thing,” he said, carefully, “but it’s Christmas Eve, so I gotta say grace. And you don’t have to say shit, you can just sit there and… judge in silence, but, uh—”

“Marty, you go ahead.”

Marty looked at him. His eyes were quiet, with candlelight reflected in them.

“Yeah?”

And Rust gave a little shrug and a conceding tilt of his head.

“Alright,” said Marty. “Alright, then.” And he dropped his head and folded his hands. There was a silence then under the soft strains of music still coming from the radio, a silence longer and deeper than a whole night sky could have contained before he said, “Lord, I wanna thank you for all the blessings you’ve given us. For my two beautiful daughters. For… this food. For our electricity. For the ability to live in the country we in in. For the Christmas tree. For… granting me the best sex of my life—” And across the table, Rust burst out with startled laughter. “—and with a _man_. With _Rustin fucking Cohle_. And so, uh… anyway. Thank you for the food. Thanks for my daughters. Thanks for… for Rust. Alright. Let’s eat.”

He clapped his hands together and immediately grew ferociously engaged in cutting up the chicken, clearing his throat and pointedly watching his own hands.

Rust reached for the mashed potatoes.

“So,” he said, with smugness humming in the undertones of his voice, “I’m the best lay you ever had, huh, buddy?”

“Fuck you,” Marty said, trying very hard not to laugh. “I was talkin’ to _God._ ”

“Ya, I’m sure He’d be very interested in our sex life.”

“You listen to all those preachers, man, and you start thinking He probably is.”

“How ‘bout we don’t listena preachers, alright, after all the shit we’ve fucking seen.”

“A-fuckin-men.”

“Gimme a slice of that bird.”

There wasn’t much comment after that. The chicken was dry; the mashed potatoes were soupy; the eggnog was warm. They ate like they’d been starved for decades.

Marty had the radio turned up high again by the time he leaned back in his chair and tipped the last of his eggnog back. Rust was stripping the tiniest scraps of the meat off the bones of a wing. The table was fully demolished. And the chair legs squealed as Rust stood up and began clearing away the plates.

Marty came up behind him as he settled them into the sink.

And Rust turned. He put his hands up on Marty’s shoulders. He pressed a kiss, closed and chaste, to his lips, just as the first opening notes of a new song started up on the radio. And then— _“I don’t want a lot for Christmas”—_ without any warning, he centered one palm flush on the small of Marty’s, wrapped one around his hand, and steered him gently to the center of the little hardwood floor.

And, though there was hardly any room, and Marty was blushing fit to burst in the half-light of the candles, and there was static thrumming alone behind the slow, melancholy rendition of the familiar song, they danced.

Rust led. And Marty, for the first time, felt like he knew what he was doing as his feet stepped slow and soft underneath him.

They swayed along against one another, warm, together. And neither of them said a word.

“ _Make my wish come true… You know that all I want for Christmas is you.”_

**Author's Note:**

> This is the song, in case you wanted to know: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkN5M-nJx6A :)


End file.
